Upgrading to Fedora 23 from Fedora 22 with dnf

Fedora aficionados know that Red Hat’s yum aka Yellowdog Updater Modified has been kicking around for eons but it is now deprecated and has been officially replaced by dnf aka Dandified Yum. Seriously, there were times when we didn’t go near yum because it was so awfully flaky and unable to resolve dependencies. Over the years we saw it improve immensely and performing on par with Debian‘s Aptitude. So farewell yum, you’ll be missed.

For an in-depth guide about the changes to Red Hat‘s updating tool, check out this document that goes into more detail about replacing yum with dnf.

This also means that we no longer need to use FedUp to upgrade to a new version of Fedora. Oh well. It was fun to say (and type) “FedUp” while it lasted.

For the purpose of this exercise, we’re upgrading from Fedora 22 to Fedora 23, but if you do need to know what version of Fedora you’re using, the following command will do this for you:

cat /etc/redhat-release

Updating Fedora with dnf before the Upgrade

Before we start, it’s also a good idea to update your system first, so start by updating Fedora using dnf.

dnf update

It should also go without saying that you should take a backup before executing a major update/upgrade, but I digress.

Starting the Fedora Upgrade

Once that’s complete, reboot your machine, log back in,  and start the upgrade process by running the following:

dnf upgrade

Next, install dnf plugin upgrade by installing dnf plugin system upgrade. This is what is actually replacing FedUp.

dnf install dnf-plugin-system-upgrade

Once that is complete, run the full system upgrade:

dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=23

This will run for quite awhile, fetching and upgrading packages so the time it takes will depend on how many packages you actually have installed on your workstation. It took a good 2 hours to upgrade my sad I3 Dell Latitude, but once it was done, we had a shiny new Fedora 23 to log in to. Pretty uneventful upgrade overall and no issues to report, which is how we like it:)

Enjoy!

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